A few years ago I noticed a bunch of hashtags appearing in the “Trending Topics” section of Twitter that I just couldn’t make heads or tails of. Each one I clicked on revealed a sea of black faces and I thought, Oh! This is some kind of in-joke in the African American community. When I could figure out what the tweets were about (and often I couldn’t), they were often really funny, sometimes poking fun at black celebrities or taking white people to task for their ignorance of black culture and the black experience. There were also a lot of provocative topics such as #thingsblackpeopledo, which often played with sensitive racial stereotypes (think watermelon, unemployment, etc.) sometimes inverting them or re-invoking them in clever and surprising ways.

This development was really exciting to me because I believe that one of the huge social and political benefits of social media networks is that diasporic communities – dispersed groups that have shared interests – can cheaply and easily find one another, exchange ideas, build community and work together to accomplish shared goals.

Fast forward to 2013: we had just launched the new Media Impact Project at the Norman Lear Center and I was looking for a way to collaborate with the Annenberg Innovation Lab, a group at USC that had been publishing some very interesting research on Twitter. I was thrilled when Kevin Driscoll, a PhD student in the Lab, told me that he was hoping to drum up some interest in researching Black Twitter. We had both noticed that academic researchers hadn’t really grappled with the topic yet, even though the phrase was becoming more common in news media after Black Twitter was given credit for focusing media attention on the Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis cases.

We were also a bit surprised that academics didn’t seem to be responding to studies demonstrating that African Americans were seriously embracing Twitter. A research team at Northwestern found that black college students were over-represented on Twitter and Pew found that an astounding 28% of African Americans use Twitter with 13% using it on a daily basis. Just to give you some context, only 12% of whites are on Twitter and only 2% of all online adults use Twitter in a typical day.

One of the more amazing side-effects of having videos on TED.com is that you receive invitations to speak all around the world. For the last two years, the intrepid organizers of the APOGEE conference at the Birla Institute of Tecnology and Science (BITS), one of the premier technical universities in India, had invited me to visit their obscure corner of Rajasthan and speak at their signature annual event. I had been warned that I would probably have a lot of difficulty traveling alone as a white woman in Rajasthan, and so I had to decline their requests until I could line up a male chaperone. Luckily for me, he materialized last Fall at a conference at MIT – BITS Pilani’s sister university, as it were – and we planned our great Indian adventure together.

When I alerted the BITS Pilani crew to my traveling companion’s bio (John Beck had been the Director of Photography for all of NASA’s Mars missions for the last 18 years), they invited him to speak at the conference as well.

I have long been an admirer of Indian textiles, the incredible classical music and dance, and like most city dwellers, I fight with my friends about who has the best Indian take-out. But I had heard many grisly tales about the filth, the misogyny, the appalling poverty, and the deeply ingrained institutional corruption.

But the overriding reason that I decided to make the journey was because I could not turn down the chance to witness the incredible change that is afoot in India. I was thrilled when the organizers asked me to speak about the social impact of social media in India, a topic that I’ve been following closely for some time.

Even though the Internet penetration rate is extremely low in India, the 17% of Indians online already account for the third largest Internet population in the world. They will move up to number two next year, powered in part by a 91% increase in smart phone ownership by 2016.

And just in case you didn’t know, Indians are really, really social. Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn are flourishing in India, where 25% of all time online is spent on social networks.

Last year, LinkedIn celebrated luring 20 million Indians to their service, making Indians the second largest member base. Google+ has attracted a much higher share of online Indians than it has in the States (78% vs. 44%). I was greeted with loud applause when I displayed data from GlobalWebIndex demonstrating that online Indians are far more likely than online Americans to own and use social media accounts on all the major social media platforms.

Who knows what new platforms will be arriving over the next couple of years, but whatever they are, they will see an increasing share of Indians using them. And traditional media – film, TV, publishing – both in India and all around the world, will never be the same. Read the rest of this entry »

For several years now, I have been on the board of an experimental literary press where we have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to keep the printed book vibrant and alive. At Les Figues Press, we decided to publish books in unique dimensions and we coupled each author’s work with the visual work of another artist, hoping against hope that the resulting physical object would convince even the most cyber-savvy readers to purchase our special little hunks of pulverized tree.

So I contantly keep my eyes peeled for efforts to revitalize interest in the printed book. My most recent encounter with an inspiring innovation was in Medellin, Colombia, where the intrepid forces behind Proyecto Liquido – a group that explores the overlapping territory in fiction, art, science and technology – had transformed an online short story published 18 years ago into a surprisingly layered tactile experience.

With a black rubberized cover (not unlike the one on my iPad), Kij Johnson’s Chicas Miticas (Myth Girls) feels more like a machine than a book. Everything inside is dual: from the bilingual translation (Spanish and English) to the double-sided format (the book is basically composed of two pamphlets facing one another). While one side is devoted to a disturbing tale about the terrible cost of freedom, the opposite renders the story into sleek, hyper-polished illustrations by Oscar Gonzalez, one of the five collaborators who transformed Johnson’s story into this unique material object.

If the book were simply illustrated, and bound in this surprising way, it would have been arresting enough. But three pages into the lushly animated version of this stark tale, you finally see a depiction of the main character, but only from behind, and rendered on vellum, so that you can see her ghost-like presence in two inhuman vistas, extended by a trifold. A few pages further in, you reach the material heart of the work, where lush illustrations bleed into layered vellum inserts and – I kid you not – a ripped quilted jacket is sewn directly onto the page. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I was very excited to launch the Media Impact Project, which aspires to be a global hub for the best research on measuring the impact of media. Supported by $3.25 million in initial funding from the Gates and Knight Foundations, I’m optimistic that the Norman Lear Center can help make media more accountable to audiences and contribute to a better understanding of the role that media plays in people’s lives.

The New York Times picked up the story and I was thrilled to see reporter Michael Cieply focus on this aspect of the program:

Not only do I get to go to TED this year (hooray!) but I also had the great pleasure of participating in a truly brain-tingling workshop whose goal was to help TED figure out how to better facilitate the spread of breakthrough ideas.

Of course everybody (and their mother) is obsessed with web analytics these days: how many hits did I get? How many likes? But media engagement pros (and the workshop was chock full of them) realize that counting clicks doesn’t really begin to tell the full story. Who’s clicking and why? Did they talk to their dad about that TED talk over breakfast? Did they laugh or cry? Did they feel empowered to do something? Did they make a donation? It can be really difficult to accurately measure the impact of any piece of media (including a TED video) without finding a way to bridge that daunting divide between online click trails and offline actions. One way to do it? Surveys!

I’m a big believer in supplementing rigorous web and social media analytics with survey research. And I’m an even bigger fan now that my team at the Lear Center has developed some innovative new methods for taking into account self-selection bias in media consumption (i.e., only certain people decide to see certain TED videos – there’s nothing random about it – which makes it tough to accurately measure impact).

So, imagine my delight when I heard that the Knight Foundation is partnering with TED to work on amplifying and measuring the impact of their content as it “ripples through society, producing technology tools and best practices for connected action.”

One key theme that emerged at the workshop this weekend was the importance of sharing the discoveries that TED will make when they develop their new kick-ass website and state of the art dashboards for tracking engagement. Information is power and nothing is more empowering to an engaged audience than access to information about how their beloved TED talks, along with all the content and actions that they themselves have generated, are moving the needle.

I’m looking forward to what comes of this . . . stay tuned!

If you’re at TED2013, be sure to check out the Knight-sponsored pavilion centered on Tech for Engagement.

My clever friend, Tim Leberecht, is a marketing guy and so he knows just how little control companies have over their brands. The reputation of a brand is basically what a brand is and no matter how much money you throw at it, ultimately, customers, and the general public, will determine a brand’s reputation.

In his TED talk, Tim explores how companies can productively cede control to their customers and employees as well as exerting new types of control and influence in creative new ways in social media contexts. I don’t want to give too much away — it’s only six minutes so check it out!

I was delighted when the editors of Women’s Studies Quarterly asked me to submit a piece to them about social media and gender. They had seen my TEDWomen talk on the same topic and suspected (correctly) that I’d be interested in pursuing those themes in print. They made another request as well: might I think of a way to add a visual component and a social media campaign of some sort?

Now that’s the kind of thing that takes a village. Thankfully, I have one! I immediately turned to the Lear Center’s terrific in-house designer, Veronica Jauriqui (who designed the visuals for two of my TED talks) and my trusty intern (and social media expert) Sarah Ledesma. Through Sarah we met the tremendously talented photographer Jasmine Lord, who immediately understood what we wanted (you can read about all of them here). I’m incredibly proud of the results, which you can check out on Pinterest and Tumblr.

Narrating Behavior Change

It was exhilarating to participate in a five-day workshop in Mexico City hosted by the World Bank. Researchers, media makers and development experts from 15 countries shared knowledge about entertainment education techniques and worked together to develop new behavior change campaigns across Africa and South America. Find out more.

Fashion & Politics

Does fashion play a role in politics? You betcha! But all the fashion rules are turned on their head in a world where having a signature style can make you a target for derision. I had a lot of fun talking to Esquire about who's deviated from the uniform (e.g., Bernie) and why.
Find out more.

ONA LONDON

I'll be crossing the pond to attend the Online News Association's conference in London, March 6, 2015. The focus is on mobile and so I'll be presenting the Media Impact Project's latest how-to guide on Mobile Metrics. Find out more about
the session
.

Social Media in India

A big highlight of my year was a trip to India to speak at
APOGEE, a technical extravaganza including over 6000 students, 100 colleges, and 80 technical events at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani. I was joined by a star-studded crew, including Mansoor Khan, a titan of the Indian Film Industry, and Dr. Walter Lewin, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the MIT. Check out the
video of my talk on the social impact of social media in India, where digital social networking is booming (especially among women). Find out more about the event
here.

Mission Creek Festival

I'm very excited to keynote the Innovation Conference at the Mission Creek Festival, a wonderful music, film, lit and food fest that takes over the entirety of Iowa City. I'll be talking about Technologies of Taste and the impact of recommendation systems. Headliners include great indie bands like Real Estate, Foxygen and the clever Father John Misty, along with literary superstars like Lorrie Moore and that quirky Ander Monson. Join us March 31 - April 5!
Find out more.

Pop Culture & Science

Last Fall, I attended a timely workshop at MIT on
The Evolving Culture of Science Engagement. Sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Culture Kettle, we explored how popular culture helps frame, inform and distort our understanding of science. Read the report.

Real Food Media Contest

I had so much fun juding the Real Food Media Contest last year that I'm doing it again. And I'm thrilled to see that Tom Colicchio, Padma Lakshmi, Jamie Oliver, Michael Pollen, Eric Schlosser, and Alice Waters have signed on as well. We’ll be looking for short films that tell great stories about sustainable food and farming:
Check out the finalists and vote for your favorite..

On The Media

I met Bob Garfield, host of NPR's popular program "On The Media," at a terrific conference hosted by TTI/Vanguard, where both of us gave talks on some big problems in the media industry. Afterward, Bob interviewed me about Netflix's data-driven decision to produce the edgy "Orange is the New Black," and included it in an episode called "Dare to Stream.".

LEAP Symposium @ Art Center

I'm a huge fan of Art Center's Designmatters program and so there was no way I was going to miss their LEAP Symposium, which brought together over 100 national thought-leaders working at the intersection of design and social innovation. With IDEO's Jocelyn Wyatt and frog's Robert Fabricant in the room, it was bound to be great. A report has been published in Design Principles and Practices: just let me know if you want a copy ;-)

Imaging War: The Primetime War on Terror

This year Drexel University will devote its Great Works Symposium to the matter of media -- specifically, how we generate images of war. I'm excited to be giving a lecture on November 5 about my research on how the War on Terror is depicted in the most popular dramas on television. Check out the video and the full report. The findings might surprise you.

Championing Women & Diversity in the Media Business

I was thrilled to join Gail Berman, the first and only female executive to hold the top posts at both a major film studio and television network, and Jacqueline Hernandez, COO of Telemundo, to talk about the importance of diversity in media organizations. This event was co-sponsored by Ms. Magazine and USC Annenberg’s Center on Communication Leadership & Policy. Watch the video.
Find out more.

Women Empowered at Cognizant

I'm flattered to have been invited back again to be the featured speaker at another Women Empowered event sponsored by Cognizant, a global IT services company that is taking gender diversity in the workplace very seriously. I'll be talking about social media and the need to recruit women in technology industries at the Computer History Museum March 4. Joining me in the conversation will be UT Austin's Tricia Berry, Fizziology COO Jen Handley and Cognizant's Ben Pring.
Find out more and register here.

TED Radio Hour

Guy Raz interviewed me about the culture of copying in the fashion industry in what he called “maybe our best show ever.” The show included one of my all-time faves, Steven Johnson, and Mark Ronson, who produced such inspired work with Amy Winehouse (may she rest in peace).
Check it out!.

My TED Talks

TEDxUSC: Lessons From Fashion’s Free Culture

I was extremely proud when TED.com picked up this talk that I delivered at TEDxUSC, the site of the first TEDx in the world. My talk focuses on the fascinating culture of creativity in the fashion industry, where copying is actually legal.

TEDWomen: Social Media & the End of Gender

I was very proud to share the stage with Madeleine Albright, Eve Ensler, Donna Karan, Sheryl Sandberg and a slew of other impressive speakers at the inaugural TEDWomen. My topic here? Social Media & the End of Gender.

TEDxOC: The Politics of Personal Taste

My fifth talk for the TED network is based on one of my favorite research projects at the Norman Lear Center. It was a special pleasure to speak at the stunning Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, California.
Watch the video
.

TEDxPHX: Can Movies Really Change People?

Here's my most recent talk which is about how movies can have a measurable impact on people's knowledge and beliefs.

Follow me on Twitter

Fashion & The Creative Commons of Color

Anyone who knows me will realize immediately that I would not be able to resist an event called "Color Lust." I am thrilled to be the keynote speaker at the 50th anniversary summit of the Color Marketing Group, which, probably unbeknownst to you, plays a role in determining the color of your furniture, your car upholstery, your nail polish . . . you name it. I'll be speaking about fashion and the ownership of color on October 28 in luscious art deco Miami!
Find out more.

TED Ads Worth Spreading

I was very proud to be a part of TED's Ads Worth Spreading challenge - an effort to acknowledge the power of advertising and to encourage those who wield that power to do something good with it. I was teamed up with
Kenzo Digital, a new media wunderkind (and an all around nice guy) to identify ad campaigns that touch a cultural nerve; ads that capture or catalyze a cultural movement, moment or event. You can check out the winners here!

Gastronomy & Technology in Barcelona

It's a techie foodie delight! I'll be delivering the keynote presentation during Gastronomy & Technology Days in Barcelona, October 18. Sponsored by the most famous chef in the world, Ferran Adria, and Telefonica, the biggest telecom company in Spain, this event will bring together people exploring the intersection between new technology and food.

Making Media Now

The Filmmakers Collaborative has asked me to speak about media-fueled impact at the Making Media Now conference at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design on June 8. My panel will discuss how cross-platform media and partnerships with NGOs, government and corporations can create measurable impact."
Find out more.